Making Neck Deep in Vile less of a pain in the neck

Wednesday night was declared “the last night we were doing this achievements BS ever again” by yours truly. 22 or so of the raid core has their drakes and four were on deck to wrap up their metas that night. We have another two that need to wrap up some earlier achievements like Boned and I’m On a Boat, but those won’t delay our starting our “victory lap” attempts on the Lich King’s hardmode like All You Can Eat or Neck Deep will.

Anyway, we’ve been trouble with that achievement for a few weeks now, because our raids tend to run really melee heavy. Most guilds might have two or three warlocks or shadow priests. We have one warlock and one shadow priest (with one healer that can offspec as a spriest) to cover those two. Combine this with the AOE nerf that hit a lot of classes and we were going to have to scrape our way to victory. Finally we pulled it off last week, scoring the achievement and the drakes for a good swath of the core.

Sidenote that will be pertinent in a moment: Towards the end of the night, Zilga (the healer with the shadow offspec) came on, and I asked a melee to volunteer to step out so we could bring another ranged dps in. As soon as I finished talking, Antigen whispered me to offer up his spot.

In preparation for round two against the Vile Spirits this week I followed up on some tips given to me via comment and twitter that suggested it’s much easier to do the achievement by having your ranged stay on the LK during the second transition. Pop bloodlust and let them go to town while at max distance. Then, when you hit phase 3 you’ll have that much less time you need to deal with the Vile Spirits.

In our case, we entered P3 with two Raging Spirits up (though one was near death) and the Lich King at 22%. We finished off the Raging Spirits, then when Vile Spirits spawned, melee followed the Lich King and I to the opposite edge for some quality time while the ranged went through the motions of downing the spirits.

Another helpful tip I picked up in my belated research was that a DK’s Army of the Dead is godly for the Vile Spirits. Once the LK is far enough away, one of the DKs would pop armies . Ghouls would taunt the spirits and assist with dps and (best of all!) the Vile Spirits would not explode upon contact with them. As a result you have the whole lot of them basically rooted for the ranged to pick off without too much trouble.

We only had one spawn of Vile Spirits. When the LK threw up the second batch on the edge I dragged him to he was at 12% health and we burnt him down to Fury of Frostmourne before the spirits could descend. All told we finished the fight with a new record of just under 4 minutes.

Of course, when Fury of the Frostmourne hit, Antigen was disconnected. Not a big deal, I thought, we’d wait for him to log back in before we actually killed the Lich King. We did the same on our first LK kill months ago when Falowin disconnected during Fury, this wouldn’t be a big deal.

Unfortunately, when Antigen logged back in his corpse was at the entrance of the dungeon. And despite my hopes, when we finished off Arthas, he didn’t get credit for the achievement.

Considering he stepped out last week so the raid could wrap up the achievement, this injustice was not going to stand.

I don’t want to steal too much thunder from the eventual post Antigen will do detailing the nonsense that followed, but suffice it to say, Antigen got credit for the achievement. And then later credit for the meta as well since Glory of the Icecrown Raider didn’t recognize that everything was then done.

25 support tickets and about two hours later, everything went better than expected.

The Switch to Mumble

You might have seen from the blog posts or from our twitter feeds that Enveloping Shadows recently switched from to Mumble from Ventrilo. Here’s a little story about why we switched and why I’ve fallen completely in love with Mumble.

Primary Target Can Suck It

A few months ago, the small company that used to manage our Ventrilo server got bought out by Primary Target. They changed our server information, and then a slew of technical difficulties began.

The lag was unbearable for weeks. Vent would disconnect randomly at the most inconvenient times, kicking everyone out of the raid. We ended up raiding at least once on a public vent because ours crapped out in the middle of Heroic Putricide 25, while we were learning it. To add insult to injury, Primary Target apparently “lost” the prepayment our officers made for the original server. And their customer service was plain awful – the officers got in touch with them to try to figure out what was going on, and got no information whatsoever. Their customer service sucked and gave us no hope that anything would get better, anytime soon.

After a few weeks, our poor officers sighed and decided we’d have to move. Since we were switching anyways, we opted to give Mumble a try.

Mumble For The Win

I don’t know all the technical differences between Mumble and Ventrilo, nor do I really care about going into them in this blog post. You can go read plenty of other sites for that. As a tank, a very talkative person, and a weekend raid leader, here’s my impression of Mumble post-switch.

1) Sound Quality

It just plain sounds better. Vent sounds awful and scratchy in comparison. And voice modulation! I know you can do this with Vent, but Mumble does it so much better! Hearing the whole raid swoon as Mumble automatically modulated down the voice of a certain holy pally who enjoys screeching at the raid when something goes wrong… it was truly amazing.

2) People Can Talk Over Each Other

We have a talkative vent. People talk right over poor Rhidach constantly – he doesn’t just have to yell, he has to really moan and groan and threaten to quiet us all down, and even then people will start right back up with the banter when he’s done going through a strat. We will gleefully poke at each other, mock each other, and discuss everything from class changes to whose child is cuter straight through into a progression pull until a difficult game mechanic (or an irritated tank) shuts everyone up. We will also enter into a strategy discussion – a ton of us will – with equal gusto, and we like to hang out in vent for hours after raids. When we learned Heroic Putricide and Heroic Sindragosa, the hardest adjustment might have been to keep vent “clear” for plague call outs, healer calls and tank swaps.

We talk over each other. A lot. Vent sounds like crap when two people try to talk at once. Mumble doesn’t sound perfect, but you don’t get that crazy feedback noise, and you can hear everything said by each person.

3) No Latency. No Delay.

I have a lot of silly pet peeves. Raid calls are one. I get very, very irritated when someone takes it upon themselves to call something out and they call it out late. I watch raid warnings and listen to vent simultaneously, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a raid warning pop and heard a call just a half second or second later… and thought, with irritation, “That wasn’t exact. Why call it out?”

Little did I know, this was a Vent delay issue, not a raid awareness issue. Because as soon as we switched to Mumble, that mysterious and hard to quantify delay just… disappeared. I now hear calls simultaneous with raid warnings.

Oh my god, it’s beautiful. It’s so beautiful. As a raid leader, I was sold from the first Heroic LK pull. You don’t understand until you hear someone call a Defile target RIGHT AS the raid warning pops. It’s really cool.

Check out my post a few days ago on Heroic Halion, where I talk about how the healers yelled at people who had Combustion. I’d be willing to bet that Mumble over Vent made a difference as far as response time goes. I am an aural person. I respond better to sounds than visual cues, which is why I always play with game sounds on. Switching to Mumble was a game-changing experience for me.

The End Result

I don’t know if Rhi feels as strongly as I do. I know the whole raid was extremely skeptical, especially the day we lost about half an hour before raid while everyone found the client and installed it. And yet within an hour or so, everyone was completely sold on the new service.

Even though we’ve had some technical difficulties with Mumble, too, the people we’ve got the server from have been great about communicating with us when something goes wrong and when it’s likely to be fixed. Customer service is really worth a lot. No one’s said a thing about returning to Vent. I’m sure Mumble isn’t for everyone, but it sure has worked well for us.

Links: Here’s a nice little Youtube video with a display of Mumble’s latency vs Vent’s latency. The Mumble website, and a link to Multiplay, the company we bought our Mumble server from (they’re great!)

Shaking up the loot system

Moving into Cataclysm, I laid out a multi-point plan for the guild and the next expansion pack. Steps I would take to improve access to the guild bank while maintaining security, steps to ease raider access to flasks and other important raiding items, a new guild site with expanded functionality (that I’m currently working on), and–perhaps most controversially–looking at a new loot system.

The current bid/DKP system has been in place since May 2009. Considering the previous loot system (rolls) went through three revisions over the six or so months we used it in Naxx, it’s pretty impressive we stuck with the DKP system for as long as we did. And with no real drama to boot.

So why do I want to ditch it? Well, while DKP works well on the surface, there are a lot of macro issues that have been piling up that are exposing how unfair a bid/DKP system can be over a period of time. And it’s my personal opinion that the fundamental unfairness of the system is hurting the raid in a very subtle way.

Consider, as an example, the holy paladin. No other class or spec uses spell plate, so when you run with one holy paladin (as we did for so long), you have a raider that is essentially getting all their chest, legs, shoulders, belt, gloves, wrists, etc., gear for 1 DKP. (Lacking fixed prices was a huge error in hindsight.) So, anyway, this hypothetical holy pally can turn around and then run the table on necks, weapons, shields, tier pieces, and so on, because they’ll naturally have a larger DKP pool than others.

(Sidenote: I’m using a holy paladin as just an example since they’re the most obvious example of someone who can unintentionally benefit from bid/DKP. I don’t mean to cast aspersions at any real holy paladins participating in any real bid/DKP systems.)

What kind of opened my eyes to the severity of this situation was last week in raid when a few folks were talking about their four piece heroic tier gear, and other folks didn’t have any. And all those folks that didn’t have a single heroic tier piece were the ones with the most gear competition.

There are other intricacies of the system that I want to quash. Like how it allows hoarding, which I hate with a fiery passion. If there’s one rule I can make stick in Cataclysm, it’s that people will be severely penalized for waiting for a piece that might never drop while passing on upgrades that are there and available.

Long story short: the current system is operative, but it’s broken at a deep level. And it needs to go.

So where do we go from here? We had a meeting last night exploring EP/GP and doing a dry run of Naxx10 with the addon to see how to worked. And I think it went pretty well. People seem to be gelling to what I’m selling and share my concern for the unfairness of bid/DKP. The next step seems to be to introduce it to the guild, explain the ins and outs, and so on. In a sense, this post is the first salvo in that discussion, since many of my guildmates read this space. I’ll be posting a detailed FAQ on the forums and hold a Q&A session to talk about EP/GP as we get closer to raiding in Cataclysm.

For the time we’ll continue with DKP, until December 7th. But after that I will gladly bury our old friend, with little ceremony for (hopefully) something better.

Heroic Halion 10 for Halloween

Hey all, remember me? It’s Anafielle! I still have author privileges! Rhidach hasn’t taken them away since I got up on TV and claimed the blog was mine! He did threaten to gkick me, but luckily I have blackmail photos from Blizzcon. /cackle

Since Patch 4.0 killed my usual 10 man raid, I’ve been enjoying my free Sunday nights. I’ve been taking advantage of my spare time by … playing more wow. And so, on Halloween night, I found myself talked into coming along to a raid I had wanted to see for some time: Heroic Halion 10.

Ruby Sanctum

Our setup: dual pally tanks, three heals (including a priest spec’d into Body and Soul), and five high DPS. We stuck Antigen from Haz Mace Will Raid with fire side tanking in his offspec. Poor guy.

We almost wiped on a miniboss when all three healers went offline due to phone calls or Trick or Treaters ringing the door. Both tanks died, but our co-GM and resident pro hunter kited the miniboss from 11% to zero while those of us who were dead panicked and then started cheering on Mumble.

It just wouldn’t feel like a Ruby Sanctum raid without a trash wipe.

Heroic Halion: Notes on Phase 1

The fire side tank should pull the dragon from the left side of the room. We pull Halion about halfway off the center and keep him facing to the left. Each time the meteor falls, we don’t care where it lands- the entire raid runs through the dragon.

DBM gives raid warnings for Fiery Combustion / Soul Consumption targets, and several people would calmly call out the target, just to remind them. Our snare droppers got to the edges without issue. Speaking of which, our guild recently switched to Mumble, and it really shined on a fight like this. I used to hate Vent delays on critical call-outs. Mumble has no delay. It’s amazing. We’ll never go back.

I suck at Combustion / Consumption. I tunnel vision’d a few times, and jerked awake only when I heard a healer call my name. Thank god for Engineering. I smacked my Rocket Boots and got to the edge in time to drop a tiny circle like a pro. Psh. Me? Tunnel vision? Noooo. (I did this at least three times.)

Between Rocket Boots and Body and Soul, our snare droppers had no issues at all. Our ability to deal with this mechanic without screwing it up vastly simplified the fight.

Shadow Realm Tanking

I was the Shadow Side tank. No, I do not turn the dragon the whole time. I stare at orbs and only move for Cutters. I turn the dragon with pure strafing and a little bit of forward movement. Wrathy posted an excellent guide on dragon turning some time ago that’s worth a read.

Here is my own guide to cutter survival:

• Observe the two orbs across from you.
• Center yourself between them.
• Hit strafe as needed.
• Enjoy your continued survival.

You get a ton of warning when cutters pop- there’s a DBM timer, as well as a convenient emote built into the fight that gives you about 2 seconds more warning. When the cutters were a few seconds from activating, I’d made a judgement call about whether to sit in my “pie piece” or move to the next “pie piece,” whichever one took the least movement.

Positioning is scarier on heroic, because the stakes are higher, but here’s the secret: it’s easier. Two reference points is better than one.

Shadow Realm Survival

All we really had to do was keep everyone alive through cutters. This took about two hours.

It was my first time tanking Shadow Side on heroic – and I rarely ever tank Shadow side even on Normal 25 – so it took me more than a few tries to get a feel for when to move the dragon, how fast to turn him, and how to move him predictably.

Predictable movement is the key to tanking a fight over and over. No one wants a boss jerking around randomly. And Halion definitely jerked around a bit when I was first getting the hang of it. I would adjust him pretty quickly, and pretty “late”, right before cutters. My goal for phase 2 and 3 was to get my movement as smooth and predictable as possible, but at the start of the evening, I was far from smooth about it. I figured it would be ok because we were all watching the orbs to stay alive.

It turns out I was wrong. Several of my raiders were only watching the dragon.

Watch the Orbs AND the Dragon!

I know it’s my job to get the dragon positioned right, but I didn’t realize that there were people in the raid who never looked at the orbs. This wasn’t going to fly. There’s too much delay if they just position on the dragon. You need to watch both. But at least two of the healers told me that the dragon was in the way, and they were actually incapable of seeing orbs anywhere in the room. Their only possible reference point was the dragon.

I get a little irritated when people tell me they can’t do something that their fellow raiders are doing just fine. One of the healers was seriously fighting with me, like it was my fault she died to cutters. Well, I know when I screw up, and I do it all the time and call myself out on Mumble for it. But I stand my ground when I’ve got something right. I was tanking it right, and her awareness needed some work. Her survivability was partially my job, but she needed to take some responsibility for it, too.

I pulled out an argument I save for special occasions: “Maybe Rhidach can do it that way, but I’m not him, so you’ll have to deal with me. If I’m tanking, you need to figure out some way to watch orbs. I will not have the dragon moving so perfectly that you can survive just by looking at him. So let’s all agree to be better- I will adjust earlier, and tell you when I’m moving. And you will glance up at orbs when DBM shouts at you that cutters are about to come, so you don’t die. Now, pull it again.”

And then we pulled again. There’s something to be said for winning a fight by steamrolling the competition. I wasn’t even the raid leader, but most of the time when Rhidach’s not around, I end up as the de facto raid leader since no one else steps up. People tend to listen, and I take advantage of it.

To be fair to the people having trouble with cutters, I made a serious effort to be as vocal on Mumble as I could possibly be, and I moved the dragon a lot more preemptively. I tanked better for it.

The End

It really wasn’t much more complicated than that. We just had to live through cutters. Eventually, we all lived through them … and he fell over and coughed up the purps! After just two hours of work. Not too shabby. What was so hard about that? /preen /highfive

Halion Heroic… what a fun fight. I can’t believe we didn’t hit it before.

It was challenging, and very punishing of anyone with low raid awareness, yet extremely doable by a relatively competent 10 man raid once everyone watches their surroundings. I actually thought that was one of my favorite fights on 10 that I’ve done recently, and it felt good to kill it. A sunday night well spent.